Month: April 2024

Welcome to the Content Machine podcast. We are about to start episode 2 of our interview with Amy Garner from West Tennessee Health care. So that being said, besides surviving and managing and doing well for your job during a global pandemic, what are some other things that you are proud of and accomplishments in your role as compliance and communications officer?

Well, I mentioned my team earlier. I have an incredible team of graphic designers, videographers, web people. Lori Smith is my director of marketing, and I definitely could not do my job without her because I love the public relations side of things. I love dealing with the media, as strange as that may sound to some people. But Lori is a true expert when it comes to marketing and strategy. And so I just rely on her every day to do that. And so she works with one of our agencies, our external marketing agency, and they’ve been able to… You may have seen some of our commercials, Emmy Award-winning commercials that we’ve had over the past few years. And so that’s been since I’ve taken on this role. Of course, I have nothing to do with any of that, so I can’t take any credit, but my team just does an incredible job, and they are so so talented and so gifted. And so I have to give all the credit to them. I’m very proud of all the work they’ve done over the last few years. It’s hard when you’re trying to market for a system as large as ours because we have over 90 locations.

I can’t even tell you how many service lines we have. And so there’s just not enough marketing dollars to go around. And it’s incumbent upon us to try to prioritize those things that we need to get out in the public, but also stick with a budget, because we are the largest nonprofit healthcare organization in the region, the largest nonprofit organization in the region. And so marketing dollars are important, but we don’t have all the money in the world to spend on that. So they do a great job balancing all of that.

Yeah. So when you are approaching that, how do you end up prioritizing and come up with a plan for such a big organization?

Well, lots of feedback from our service line leaders, from our executive team, the board. We meet with the board on a regular basis and have a meeting to talk about what our marketing activities are, what they think will be important in the next few months or year. We know sometimes when things are coming up, but then sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we have to just pivot on the fly, and we might have a new provider that comes to the community, for example, that specializes in something new that we haven’t done before. And so we have to be able to pivot really quickly and try to figure out how to get that word out. So it’s lots of conversations with our executive team, with service line leaders. Lori meets with a lot of our larger service lines on a regular basis to talk about what’s coming up, what’s a priority for them, any new technologies that we might be using in the near future. We also have a monthly strategy meeting with our Director of Business Development, with our Vice President, and she keeps us on task as far as what she knows might be coming up strategically that we need to be planning ahead for. So that’s helpful.

Yeah, that’s a lot to manage. Now, in the communications of a medical environment, what are specific challenges that bring that to the table? There’s probably some regulatory stuff, maybe some compliance stuff that is a little bit different than a lot of organizations have to deal with.

That’s probably true. And when I took this role, at first I thought, I’m going to have some conflict between being the compliance officer and the communications officer. But actually, it served us pretty well because, for example, there are specific rules about financial benefit that we can provide to a physician. I can’t just go out there and market for a physician who is not part of our organization. And so those questions have come up in the past as far as what those rules are. Also, when it comes to privacy, that’s an area where my compliance team is really involved with dealing with making sure all of those policies and procedures are in place, and we deal with complaints from time to time. But we can’t just go out there and get a patient and say, Hey, would you film a testimonial for us? I mean, we’ve got to have forms signed, and we’ve got to make sure they know where this information is going. We can’t just talk about Kevin Adelsberger’s care at West Tennessee HealthCare without you being involved in that. Those things have been… It’s been an advantage for me to be in both roles.

Maybe speeds up the process a little bit. Because we’ve worked with some groups where they have compliance departments, and it just slows the process down. Because it’s a third party, because they’re not involved in the process. But I guess having you involved with the process probably gets answers faster, I would bet.

Yeah, it’s worked really well for us. When I’m dealing with media relations, too, if the local media ask me a question, well, I’m familiar with the Sunshine Laws and Open Records Act, and the privacy rules, and all of those things. And so it’s easy for me to make a decision about whether I can talk about a specific topic or how they can request information from us to comply with all of that. So it’s worked really well. I haven’t had any conflict, and we’ve talked multiple multiple times about how beneficial it’s been for me to be in both roles. So for us, it works. I’m not sure that it could work for every health care organization. Sure. But for us, it seems to work well, in my opinion.

And then for you, Particularly, what are some challenges that you faced, and then how have you worked to overcome those? Is it adding skills or dealing with people or having to learn a whole new field? What have been some issues that you’ve had to deal with?

Well, I think an advantage for me is that I’ve been in the organization for so long, and I’ve been a part of operations. And so I understand the terminology a lot better than you could if you were strictly a marketing professional that didn’t work with health care clients. Some of the terminology… We use a lot of acronyms. Some of the terminology is not intuitive. Some of the technology that we use or some of the procedure names, for example, can be a little confusing if you don’t live in that world. But I’m thankful that I had a lot of that knowledge. When I do have a problem, the people around me are very happy to help educate me. My husband says that I’m pseudo-clinical.

Because your husband works in the medical side of right.

He does. He’s a clinician with an X-ray radiology background. We joke that I’m pseudo clinical because I can speak the language, but I can’t do any of that work.

You’re not putting gloves on.

That’s exactly right. You do not want me taking care of patients, ever.

So you’ve been in this role for seven years now. How have you seen communications changing since you started, and how do you see that continuing to evolve?

Well, I think social media, for sure, has really changed our world. When I first got into this role, we barely had any followers on Facebook. I don’t think that we even had a Twitter account or Instagram or any of that. We didn’t have our podcast then, and now here I am on your podcast, and we have our own podcast. So we’ve done a lot of things in the last seven years that the market was just driving us to do, right? So I think that making sure that we are keeping up with all of that technology and all of these platforms is really important. And I wish that I could foresee what coming in the future, but it changes so quickly. And digital marketing for us was something that we really did not do as much as we do now. Traditional marketing, billboards and television and radio and print, were pretty much all we did before. But now, probably more than half of our marketing budget is focused on digital marketing and social media boosting and search engine optimization and all of those things, which I knew absolutely nothing about before. But I can see that all of that is just going to continue to be more important as we go forward.

Well, Amy, thank you so much for joining us on this episode. If someone wants to stay up to date with you or with West Tennessee Health care, where would you direct them to go check that out?

Absolutely. Check out our website at www.wth.org, or you can go to any of those social media platforms that I mentioned, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. We’re out there.

Okay. Well, thank you so much, Amy.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Thank you for listening to our interview with Amy Garner from West Tennessee Health care. If you find this episode interesting, please share it with a friend. We’ll see you on future episodes of the Content Machine podcast.

As we bring our know like trust series to a conclusion, we end on trust. Once we have introduced someone to our company and we’ve gotten them to like us, now we need to close the deal by building trust. Today, we’ll talk through some of the things that we can do to increase trust with prospective customers. The first thing is sharing our experience. One of the key things that can help close new business is to share with them the experience that you have, specifically if it’s in the field that they’re looking for. For example, you might say, “We have 10 years of experience in marketing,” or even better, say your customer is a roofing company saying, “We’ve been working in residential roofing marketing for over 15 years.” That’s a hard offer for someone to turn down. A second component of showing experience is showing customer testimonials. The richer these can be with real names, pictures, and details, the better they will be at building trust with potential customers. Second question, does your customer have a good experience when they come to look at your experience? When they interact with your brand, your website, your social media, is it clear who you are?

Are all the detailed points of your brand and your website contributing to that trust over time? Or is it ruining that trust by not being clear and not being effective? The third thing is, are you able to showcase any trust signals for your brand? The Better Business Bureau used to be the clear sign of a trustworthy business, but I think they’ve lost some of the shine off their endorsement over time. Things like reviews from Google, local chamber memberships, or membership in a governing body for your industry can show legitimacy and help to seal the deal. Another thing that’s important is a clear path forward. Do clients know who to go to to start business with you or how to go about getting into business with you? Is it a call? Is it an email? Is it set pricing? Making the process clear can help build trust with the customer. And the last thing I want to say is if you can find a way to share your expertise with your potential clients, whether that be through white papers or videos or events or podcasts, it can help build trust through expertise. The more you have to share, the deeper that trust will be.

Now, what are some things that hurt our efforts to build trust? One, stock photos. Almost everyone can spot a stock photo when it is used anymore. And stock photos can trigger quality concerns for potential customers. You may have inconsistent branding, visual or otherwise. And so what I mean by that is if your visual branding, meaning your logo, has multiple versions that aren’t the same logo kit over different places, it might be a mark of concern for potential customers as they seek to build mental recognition of who your company is. Additionally, if your messaging communications vary wildly in tone from one place to another, it can be off-putting and show a lack of professionalism, which can be a concern for potential customers. Number three, if your website obscures who owns or leads the company, it can cause potential customers to wonder why that information is being hidden. If your company has great leadership, you should flaunt it. And then finally, you may have reviews, but the more generic a review is from a customer, the more fake it will seem. And you don’t want fake or seemingly fake quotes out there or testimonials out there.

It would be better to have no review than a fake testimonial or a testimonial so devoid of specific information that it could seem fake. Keep track of your best reviews, ones that show passion for the service you provided and include details about what made that service great. So are you ready to utilize the know-like-trust funnel in your business? Hopefully, this podcast mini-series has given you a leg up to getting started. If you’re implementing the funnel within your business or you’re looking for a little help getting started, we’d love to hear from you. You can shoot me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com.

As a business owner and the leader of a company, you would think it would be easy to know what success looks like. If you’re a business leader, the clear question to ask yourself might be, How much money can I make? Now, I would hope most people think that that’s not the only gauge of success, but profit is a pretty clear metric to track. Now, I am also a Christian who owns a business, and so how does my faith affect my understanding of success? Last year at the Agency Builders Conference, I got to hear from Brandon West, who owns FOS Creative in Florida. I immediately appreciated Brandon for his conviction and how his business should affect the world. The purpose over at FOS is to reach and restore the lives of women and children who have been impacted by extreme poverty and sex trafficking. So just to reiterate, Brandon’s business, a digital marketing agency similar to mine, has the mission to serve women and children who’ve been impacted by extreme poverty and sex trafficking. Brandon is wired differently, and I love it. When I heard Brandon was releasing a book, I knew it was going to be great, and that it would almost certainly end up on an episode of this podcast.

Brandon’s first book is called “It’s Not Your Business to Succeed,” which from off the jump is a little startling for someone like me. I build my day around trying to succeed. From what time I wake up to the way my phone is set up to the people I work with, the time I go to bed at night. Every bit of it is geared towards me having the opportunity to be successful. Brandon challenges this notion at its core. Therefore, Brandon’s thesis is that that is outcome-based thinking or judging everything by the bottom line, and that that can be dangerous because it’s built around the wrong things. Because ultimately, the important thing is being faithful in our everyday tasks, whether that be leading in a boardroom, parenting, or marriage, being faithful in our actions in those areas, regardless of the outcome, because the choice to make a faithful action is more important than the result. In other words, the means are more important than the ends. Why? This is what God asks of us. Brandon points to the scripture throughout the book to show that God is concerned with our faithfulness, not our success. Brandon also covers this with our need to be faithful stewards of what we have.

As a Christian, I believe my business is not my own, but I am a steward of it for God. Sometimes I need a reminder of that. But as the steward, I also need to make wise decisions with what I am entrusted. So while outcomes-based thinking is not the key, that does not mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were. We still have a responsibility over the company and to lead it well. A few years ago, we were working on a political campaign. The candidate and I knew there was a significant chance the opposing side would start campaigning in an ugly manner. We had committed to each other before the race began that we were going to run a clean campaign. When the opponent and his friends went dirty, we maintained that commitment. We pursued the faithful option. We were committed to running it the right way, regardless of the outcome, regardless of any of the negative effects the opponent’s mudslinging might have had on us. It is easy to play the game of comparison in business. This company has more staff or this company has more revenue. But maybe the question should be, are you making faithful choices day in and day out? Not if you have made more revenue than the other company.

So ask yourself this, how do you measure success? Are you judging it by the right metrics? Thank you for listening to this episode of the Content Machine podcast. If you end up reading Brandon’s book, “It’s Not Your Job to Succeed,” I’d love to hear your thoughts. Shoot me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing. Com, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Content Machine podcast.

Kevin

Welcome to the Content Machine podcast. I’m Kevin Adelsberger, and this week, I’m joined by Amy Garner, who is the Chief Compliance and Communications Officer at West Tennessee HealthCare. Thank you for joining me, Amy.

Amy

Thank you for having me.

Kevin

Amy, you have a really unique journey in your career, and I’d love for just the audience to hear starting about that. If you want to tell us a little bit about how you got to the position you’re in now.

Amy

Okay. Well, it’s probably going to be surprising to a lot of your listeners because I actually do not have a communications background. I actually have an accounting background. My undergraduate degree is in accounting. I have a master’s in business. I also have a law degree with an emphasis in health law. And then a few years ago, after I got the communications gig, I decided, well, I need to probably get some formal training in communications or public relations. I do have a certificate in public relations now. But my first love was math and accounting, of all things.

Kevin

Wow. Okay. So the first two make sense. The law degree is a little bit of an oddball there. How did you end up with a law degree?

Amy

So I was working in health care already, back in the late ’90s, and I knew that I wanted to further my education. I knew that I wanted to get a doctorate, but I didn’t want to get a PhD. So I wanted to do something with an advanced degree that would be useful at work. And obviously, I couldn’t just go back to medical school. So I decided that maybe health law might be of interest because of what I was doing at work already, because that was when the HIPAA privacy rules had just come out, and it was very useful to what I was doing. And so I thought, Well, that might be a good route for me to take. And so I ended up getting my law degree in health law.

Kevin

How about that. Did you spend any time as an accountant then?

Amy

Very briefly. I was in accounting for about four years after I joined West Tennessee HealthCare. And before that, I had actually worked in banking for a little while. But after I was in the role of the controller at one of our small hospitals, I decided that I really loved operations. I really did not want to sit in the office behind the computer and just deal with numbers all day. I really enjoyed getting out and learning from the different departments. And I was in such a small hospital, and they all just took me under their wings and taught me what they knew and what they thought I should know. And so I was able to learn all sorts of things from what happens in radiology to what happens in billing, to what happens in medical records on the nursing floor. So it was a great learning experience for me because I was so young and I just wanted to soak up everything. And so I think that that’s what led me into being the candidate for the compliance officer’s job, because you have to know a little bit about privacy. You had to know a little bit about the rules that the emergency department has.

Amy

You have to know about billing and Medicare. And so I think that that’s what led me to the place where somebody said, Hey, she might be a good compliance officer.

Kevin

So a lot of times when people hear the words Compliance Officer, nothing fun comes to mind. And all of my interactions with you, you don’t come off as a Compliance Officer to me. You have a little bit more fun than that. So what do you do as a Compliance Officer?

Amy

Well, I have to say that I’ve heard that before. It is not the most popular position to be in. And for a long time, I thought, this is the most thankless job because nobody wants to see you coming, right? Sure. And nobody wants to come to your office to tell on themselves or ride anybody else out. But I try not to be scary, and I’ve done this for so long now that I really think being in communications has helped me because people know who I am, and they know that I’m not necessarily the police. And so I think that from that perspective, you’re probably right. I am probably not the typical compliance officer, but I want to be a resource for people. And I was just sharing with somebody earlier this morning that my favorite part of my job is answering questions. As strange as that sounds, I love being able to answer people’s questions or to help them figure out where to go to get the answers that they need. And so I think that from that perspective, I try to be a resource rather than just, Oh, hey, I got you. You’re not following this policy. And sometimes I have to do that, but I try not to be awful about it.

Kevin

So you worked your way up in the business side of things, which naturally progressed into the compliance thing with the law degree and stuff.

Amy

That’s right.

Kevin

Where does communications come into that, then?

Amy

So I joke all the time that the reason that I was asked to be in communications is because I like to talk too much. So there’s probably some truth to that. Sure. J.R, my CEO, as you know, J.R, he’s the type of guy that if he ask you to do him a favor, you cannot tell him no. You’re going to say, Sure. What do you need? And that’s exactly what happened. He asked me to temporarily work with the communications and marketing team seven years ago. And at the time, I said, J.R, I don’t know anything about marketing, communications. I’d had some limited experience when I was working on my master’s degree in marketing and communications, but nothing formal. And so I was really out of my element, but I was not going to tell J.R. no. Actually, after a few months of working with the phenomenal team that I have, I said, J.R, I love it. Please let me keep it. I love it so much. And it was, I guess, part of it was that it was not so rigid, like the compliance role, and I could have some fun with writing or with doing things like this that you can’t really do as a Chief Compliance Officer.

Amy

Sure. Yeah, yeah. So I loved it. And then who knew that there was going to be a global pandemic, and so at some point, I probably should have said, No, I’m not the one. But I just felt like when all my colleagues were struggling to take care of patients and doing all that they could do, I felt like, Well, this is one way that I can help them for sure, because I’m not a clinical person, and I didn’t really know what else I could do to help them during the pandemic. So I did what I was asked to do. Actually, when I was looking back at my Facebook memories today, this is my fourth anniversary of the night that J.R called me and said, I need for you to put together a press conference for tomorrow. I need the mayors to be there. I need Kim Tedford from the Department to be there. You all are going to coordinate this. And it was like 10 or 11 o’clock at night when he called. And I was freaking out because unbeknownst to him, I had never coordinated a press conference before. I had never been a part of one, and I was clueless.

Amy

But he didn’t know that, and I didn’t tell him that at the time because I knew that no was not the right answer. And we pulled it off, and that was the beginning of all-

Kevin

Of a nightmare.

Amy

Yeah, it was the beginning of all of those media interviews and press conferences and all of those things that I did with Kim at the Health Department.

Kevin

Yeah. So you said seven years ago, you became communications. So that’s It’s March 11th, ’24, when we were recording this. So that would have been ’17, right?

Amy

That would have been 2020.

Kevin

It was four years ago. It was four years ago.

Amy

Yeah, ’17 is when I took on the role.

Kevin

So you had three years in the role before COVID struck and changed everything. So talk to us about how do you deal with communication when you’re newer into communication and you have a global pandemic ravaging your city?

Amy

I don’t know. I don’t really know that I have any great advice. I will tell you that the three years prior to the pandemic, one of the things on my to-do list was to develop a crisis communications plan, and I never put that down as a priority, and then I was living it. And so for me, it was just day to day, who do I need to communicate with? What are the messages that I need to get out there from my team? I was also having to learn all about operations and surge capacity and what it meant for us to have those portable HVAC units that were turning our units into… So that we had negative pressure rooms on those COVID floors. I mean, I was having to learn a lot, but my colleagues were great because when I asked questions, they were more than happy to share with me the information that I needed to get out there. And so in the morning, I would get up and I would follow social media to see if there was anything that I needed to address during the day, if there were any questions I needed to answer.

Amy

Then I would get on multiple calls with our incident command team, which is our emergency response teams, if you will. And I would learn what we were facing for the next 24 hours or 48 hours, what we had faced for the last 24 hours, what our COVID census was. Is there any specific information I need to get out to the public today? And then I would go through that process of whether it was a media interview, whether it was a press conference, whether it was a radio interview, whatever it was. I would try to get that information out. And then the rest of the day, I would pretty much monitor local news, social media, respond to questions. It was just a constant cycle. And I call it on the job training because I really did not know what I needed to be doing that I wasn’t doing. I just tried to keep up with everything and tried to figure out how to get information out to everybody, not just Madison County, but I had people contacting us from Haywood County or Chester County or Gibson County saying, Hey, what about us? What are you seeing in our counties?

Amy

What can we do? Can you come over here and talk with our mayor? And so there was a lot of that, too. So it was just… I just was doing whatever I could to get information out there. Yeah.

Kevin

Well, and I’d say as a citizen, I felt like it was really organized and went from my perspective, you guys were proactive and communicated well in a really stressful time period.. Thank you for tuning in to episode one of two with Amy Garner from West Tennessee HealthCare. Join us back in a couple of weeks when we release episode two of the interview.